Pharma Spam E-mails Stopped by Avira Researchers

As per the researchers at the security firm 'Avira', pharma spam e-mails professing to originate from Twitter have been stopped recently.

According to the firm, the cybercriminals have given a twist to the situation by creating an interesting subject line that informs users that they have 2 urgent messages from twitter. This creates a sense of panic and pressure in the mind of the readers, that there is some kind of emergency back in their social circle. This way cybercrooks increase the number of users that are reading the messages and open the enclosed links.

Furthermore, there are two different links in the spam e-mail that directs to two different domains. Clicking on these links, redirect the web browser to website harboring a bogus Canadian Pharma website.

This website includes a green cross, which is designed with the help of HTML tables. The content of the website states: "buy medications online here or here". The words 'here' have a hyperlink on them.

What's even more interesting is the spam filter evading technique. Some domain names were noticed in the beginning of the e-mail. These domain names were written with a white color font on a background of also white color. And not just any domain names, but the most famous websites on the web world i.e. amazon.com, google.com, aol.com, and yahoo.com.

These websites provide users with abundance of services are amongst the most popular ones on the internet. Spammers attach links to these websites in hope of getting their spam e-mails white- listed.

Likewise, the message hiding method, which makes it appear as a group of random letters to e-mail parses, is used to bypass spam filters.

Avira researchers say that this spam campaign is quite interesting as online pharmacy spam declined considerably at the beginning of October, 2010. This strange development was credited to the closing of Spamit, world's largest online pharmacy affiliate program.

Finally, security experts recommend internet users that the best technique to evade spam e-mail is to employ a spam filter. Furthermore, netizens are recommended to be extra alert while clicking on suspicious links furnished in random e-mails as they can redirect users to harmful websites.

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» SPAMfighter News - 10/19/2010